Gander Gold Corp (CSE:GAND) announced that rotary air blast (RAB) drilling at the Islander Zone on Thwart Island, Newfoundland - part of its Botwood-Laurenceton-Thwart Island (BLT) project - intersected near-surface gold mineralization.
The company said it completed three drill holes totalling 193.5 metres (m) at the project during the summer of 2023 and gold mineralization was encountered in all three holes.
Drill hole BLTRAB23-001 intersected three individual zones of gold-silver-arsenic mineralization and ended in anomalous gold-silver-arsenic mineralization, indicating that the mineralization remains open at depth, the company reported.
The results from drill hole BLTRAB23-002 demonstrated that anomalous gold-silver-arsenic-antimony mineralization starts at a depth of 12.2m and extends to 19.8m, indicative of a potential gold system.
The third drill hole hit copper mineralization immediately at the bedrock interface through to the end of the drill hole and anomalous gold-arsenic mineralization was continuous from 18.3m to 24.4m.
“We designed this first Thwart Island RAB program to drill directly under several of the surface geochemical anomalies, and beneath greater than 1 gram per ton gold grab samples that were discovered during the 2022 surface program, and while the three preliminary RAB holes did intersect mineralization, we did not necessarily identify the subsurface source of the very robust surface soil geochemical anomalies,” Gander Gold vice president exploration Ian Fraser said in a statement.
“This bodes well for the ‘open’ potential of this mineralized system, or systems, at Thwart Island, and logical next steps would include additional surface mapping and possible trenching to better understand the orientation and controlling structural dynamics of this gold system."
Gander Gold is one of Newfoundland’s largest claim holders targeting new high-grade gold discoveries with a current focus on the large Gander North, Mount Peyton and BLT projects where there has been very promising exploration success.